age. They did not want to go, of course, and it was particularly
terrible to them, because neither I nor their mother were to go
with them. But I was anxious they should go: there is nothing
better for children than occasionally to visit a strange house, and
to go by themselves without an elder person to depend upon. It
gives them independence and gets rid of shyness. They end by
enjoying themselves immensely, and perhaps making some romantic
friendship. As a child, I was almost tearfully insistent that I
should not have to go on such visits; but yet a few days of the
sort stand out in my childhood with a vividness and a distinctness,
which show what an effect they produced, and how they quickened
one's perceptive and inventive faculties.

When they were gone I went out with Maud. I was at my very worst, I
fear; full of heaviness and deeply disquieted; desiring I knew well
what--some quickening of emotion, some hopeful impulse--but utterly
unable to attain it. We had a very sad talk. I tried to make it
clear to her how desolate I felt, and to win some kind of
forgiveness for my sterile and loveless mood. She tried to comfort
me; she said that it was only like passing through a tunnel; she
made it clear to me, by some unspoken communication, that I was
dearer than ever to her in these days of sorrow; but there was a
shadow in her mind, the shadow that fell from the loneliness in
which I moved, the sense that she could not share my misery with
me. I tried to show her that the one thing one could not share was
emptiness. If one's cup is full of interests, plans, happinesses,
even tangible anxieties, it is easy and natural to make them known
to one whom one loves best. But one cannot share the horror of the
formless dark; the vacuous and tortured mind. It is the dark
absence of anything that is the source of my wretchedness. If there